A life in balance.

It's important to balance work and play. Especially when your work is play. The relentless people in life are painful to be around and the lazy ones are worse. Business and pleasure should be like two sides of a sinusoidal wavelength on a graph. A symmetrical balance of achievement and fun. Too much of one dulls the senses. Too much of the other dulls the thrill.

We shoot for fun. We shoot for business. And then we do other stuff like read books and take naps. Swim and go out for lunches. Too much of anything affects the balance. Too many obligations affect the balance. Not enough fun is just as bad.

So, when I think about photography I wonder how to maintain the balance and resist the temptation to overindulge. How much gear is too much and how much is too little. How long to hang on to tradition and when is it time to create new traditions.  A life in balance is smoother, easier, more efficient and more effective. I think it's a more comfortable way to live.  A life in the arts should alway have room for something mundane and necessary to balance out those feelings of intensity that come bundled with creativity. For every super model shoot done with priceless cameras there should be a balance of rinsing the dinner dishes and doing the taxes. One side is fun while the other side keeps everything in the right perspective.

And don't forget to make mistakes now and then. They can lead you in very interesting directions. 

On a road trip for a magazine. And other stream of consciousness errata.

I was on a private road and I stopped the car and put it in "park" before I even touched my camera!

(clarification suggested by my attorney.....)

I photographed at a law firm yesterday and I had a blast. I did fun portraits with everything from available light to massive strobes. We did non conventional group shots. I fought with my mild acrophobia and leaned over the railing on the 28th floor patio in order to take some skyline shots. It was an enthusiastic day. And then I came home, downloaded files, charged batteries and got ready to do it all over again. But in a totally different venue. 

Where yesterday was about a group of fun, kinetic and interesting attorneys, right in the middle of the pulsing coolness of downtown Austin, the stuff I shot today was rural and calm. 

Yesterday I shot with Sony a99's and Rokinon Cine lenses and I lit up everything with the big Elinchrom Ranger RX AS power packs (strobes). Today I shot with a Panasonic GH3 and the new lens, the 12-50mm. Yes, you are allowed to go back and forth between systems...

I packed two GH3s, one G6 and eight lenses. I used the new 12-50mm lens exclusively. Loved it. Everything was on a tripod. Every shot was RAW+Large Jpeg (just in case of worse case...) but I didn't worry because you may have noticed that I tested the lens for a couple days after I bought it but before I used it on a paying job with a client.

I hauled along four Elinchrom moonlights and a case full of umbrellas and stands. I had a nice, calm day of shooting interior and exterior photographs for a shelter magazine that covers early American life.

I loaded up the car last night. Yes, I live in a safe neighborhood, unless you consider the coyotes. I got up this morning---early, zapped some French toast that Belinda made me last night, filled a travel mug with coffee from the Keurig and got dressed. I munched and swigged coffee while I got Ben up for early cross country practice. He didn't want to get up but I was already envying him the workout because I had to skip my swim.

We cruised to the school at first light and I dumped him out of the car and then headed west on Hwy 290, through Johnson City and onward to Fredericksburg, Texas and points west. I followed my instructions perfectly and punched into the gate about ten minutes before nine. I was at a ranch about 8.5 miles from the edge of Fredericksburg. As I drove in the half mile to the main house I went past herds of cattle and herds of goats and sheep. Reminded me that I live in Texas. 

I was greeted by the owner of the house and her faithful dog. I unloaded three cases of gear and got to work with the GH3 and the 12-50mm trash lens. The point of the assignment was to capture a the interior of a fully restored 17th century log cabin, lovingly transported piece by piece to this Texas ranch and decorated with historic and authentic Christmas decorations. I started in the kitchen with two umbrella lights. Why was I using studio flash? Because the house is covered with windows and I wanted to maintain detail outside ( f8 @ 1/160th of a second) and still have the interior show normally. Can't really do that yet with continuous lighting. Well, at least not continuous lighting that's either budget-able or cool to operate. 

I spent all day working the house. I used Raw+Jpegs as a life jacket because, as you know, I am a newbie in this system. I tried the HDR settings and I also experimented with the automatic dynamic range settings. I did custom white balances and sometimes I just dialed in the color temperatures I knew were right.

The home owner/rancher was wonderful and even made me lunch. By wonderful I mean that she was warm and welcoming and, after introducing me to the house, she went off to read a novel and let me work through by myself. 

By three in the afternoon I'd covered everything I could think of, inside and out. I packed up the lights and the stands and umbrellas and dumped them into the car. I played with the dog for while and I played six degrees of separation with the home owner. Yes, I went to high school with her physician. 

We chatted for a bit while I rubbed behind her dog's ears. Then I put the cameras in the old, beige Domke bag and headed out toward the highway. On the homeowner's suggestion I stopped for coffee at the Java Ranch on Main St. in Fredericksburg for a coffee and it was good. Then I headed back to Austin. 

When I finally made it through rush hour traffic, greeted the kid and kissed the wife I found a cardboard box on the dining room table. The folks at Samsung sent me a final production copy of the Galaxy NX camera. Another source sent along a package with a lens hood for the Olympus 12-50mm lens (just after the nick of time....). I've got the Samsung battery charging and I did promise to give the production model a try out. I'll only write about it if they improved the stuff I bitched about and made it a fun shooting camera. 

Belinda ran off to a school meeting about college finance and the kid and I had a quiet dinner and talked about our "work" days. He went to school---I shot pictures.  We both did pretty well. 

I just downloaded all 227 files from today and looked at random shots. The lens, on a tripod, is pretty darn good. The camera is great. Aperture is a wonderful software programs for tweaking and the files looked pretty darn good with a little bit of sharpening and a bit more mid-range contrast. Yeah, you can do decent work with pretty much everything on the market these days...

Tomorrow? A swim just in front of the arctic blast coming through. Then lunch with a friend/client at the Indian Restaurant and the rest of the day spent in the studio post processing the last two jobs. When the boy gets home we'll order a big pizza and share the day. In the later evening I'll finish editing a TV spot for the Theatre.

I'm spending Friday swimming in the cold and then charging batteries and stuff and testing a few new flashes for the Pana/Oly gear. On Saturday I've got a full day of photographing the parade, ground breaking and grand opening of the new Austin Children's Museum. It's called: The Thinkery. I haven't decided on cameras yet but I'm having the urge to take them all. And since the weather is threatening temps in the lower 30's, a 20 mile per hour wind and sleet or freezing rain I'll also take a couple pairs of gloves and my "Indiana Jones" hat with the wide brim. Life is continually exciting.

So......this is what this photographer's life is all about this week. Good jobs, good clients and checks clogging up my mailbox. Nice. Lots for which to be thankful. Hope your year is ending well too...

Our fascination with indestructible tools should be over by now.....

The camera above is an Alpa 9D. It's an indestructible, handmade, Swiss camera from the late 1960's or early 1970's. If there is plastic on the camera I've never been able to find it. Everything is steel or some sort of magic Swiss alloy. It was built on the premise that we'd always be using film and that while film might change and lenses might get better the basic box would never change and precision shutter speeds would always be precision shutter speeds. And that's why these cameras were very, very expensive. They were expensive because we expected that they may last for thirty, forty or fifty years. That's what your money bought.

But why do we give a sh*t about indestructibility now? Why do people pass over the very, very good visual performance of Nikon D800s and Canon 5D mk111 cameras to (over)pay for D4s and 1DX cameras?  You may be able to strafe them with machine guns or drop them from your Apache attack helicopter and have some sort of reasonable (but irrational) belief that they will survive intact but the reality is that almost every camera out in the market will be tossed into the trash can because its sensor has become obsolete long before any of them blow a gasket or disintegrate. Since a tiny, tiny slice of professional photographers make any sort of money shooting sports it certainly can't be pragmatism that motivates buyers. I think it's more a matter of ego or talisman worship.

I haven't bought a "Professional" camera body in quite a while. The last one I bought, brand new, was a Nikon D2Xs which I had for..........all of eighteen months. And I re-sold it because Nikon came out with a raft of much cheaper cameras that materially out performed the D2Xs in image quality. And hey, as a commercial photographer I rarely needed to take my cameras out in the rain or drop kick them into some rigorous service. And I rarely struck the camera vigorously with ball peen hammers....

Now I'm getting into the habit of buying cutting edge consumer cameras that deliver great images in more or less temporal packages. Stuff that will fall apart if you beat the hell out of it. But you know what? Everyone I know who buys D4s, 1DXs, and all the other "indestructible" cameras out there sticks them into padded cases and then inside additionally padded, wheeled cases. The cameras are coddled like babies. And why wouldn't they be? The owners paid a premium to own them....

I talked to a camera repair professional who works on all brands and all models. Guess what? In the current digital age the cameras with the lowest shutter counts, which he evaluates as trade-ins for a retail chain,  are the "pro" cameras. The cameras most used? The mid-tier cameras. Cameras that deliver between 85 and 105% of the visual performance of the pro cameras at fractional prices. 

The new paradigm? Buy the cameras that work well for you and just anticipate that they'll be gone in two years. Need rugged? Buy three cheap ones at $600 each ($1800) and pocket the rest of the money you would have spent on a D4. Or you can use that other $3200 dollars to buy some really nice lenses. 

The Alpa 9D is like a rugged, aging biker who would look at the current crop of "pro" cameras as a bunch of "flash in the pan" poseurs. The whole rationalization of ruggedized cameras is so bogus in the digital age. I'd rather think of my cameras like laptop computers....if they lasted two years I'd be happy. If they lasted four years I'd be ecstatic. The lenses are a whole other story. 

Go figure. Need a weather proof camera? Have you tried spraying your cheap Canon Rebel with some ScotchGuard? Have you heard about ZipLoc (tm) plastic bags? Indestructible? A super premium for weatherproof? Get over it....

Lens review. The Olympus .........../.........

12 mm

Ahhhh. Reviews on the web. Reviews on the lens review sites. Hmmmm. No. As most of you know I'm not much inclined to use wider angle lenses except out of necessity. Like those times that the paying client wants just a bit more in the frame. Or occasions when I want to make the client's 400 square foot "factory" look---interesting. 

Well I recently accepted an assignment to go to Fredericksburg, Texas and photograph a house for a national shelter magazine. Of course I decided to shoot the whole assignment on micro four thirds because, well.....I'm not sure why. It just seems like the fun thing to do. Then I thought back over thirty years of assignments for shelter magazines and remembered that many of the establishing shots we did depended on wider angle lenses. 90mm on my old Linhof 4x5. The 38mm Biogon on my Hasselblad Superwide, etc. and I realized that the widest optic I had for the new Panasonic GH3's (and that darling G6) was the 14-42 kit lens. Well, that just wouldn't cut it. So I started to go through my options. I could buy a Panasonic 7-14mm but that's a lot of cash for something I rarely want to use. I could save a few bucks by getting the Olympus 12mm f2 but, again, lots of cash. I started looking around at the other options. After all, this m4:3rd system is supposed to be powerful when it comes to the sheer amount of lenses available, right?

Well, I did find one option that was much cheaper and would give me the 12mm I was looking for but there were a few issues.....it must be the most maligned zoom lens on webdom today. Every site I went to for reviews talked about the vicious vignetting, the mediocre sharpness and the woefully dark aperture at the long end. I came away thinking the lens would make edge lines curvier than a Slinky at the wide end, with blackened corners from vignetting while the long end would be like there was a number 10 soft focus filter permanently attached. And all through the reviews I was given to believe that the 1/3 smaller f-stop would making viewing images at the long end of the zoom like looking through a beefy neutral density filter. I vacillated for a day and looked around for more bargains. Finally, I found the lens in question, used, for a little over $200 and thought, "I've made more stupid gambles so...why not?"

It thought this was pretty good for a handheld twilight shot at 12mm but I thought the 

image stabilization was a big help....until I realized that neither the lens nor the 

camera (G6) has image stabilization....

Not finding too much problem with flare...

 see the full 12mm frame below. This is a crop...

Start your pixel peeping engines!!!

And the Panasonic G6 even corrected the geometry of the lens...wide open at 12mm.

Confused that I might have gotten too sharp a version.....

 Nearly wide open @ 12mm. Still looking for the vignetting...

50mm wide open at f6.3

 Some topical holiday imagery from a scouting trip today.

Well, the lens in question is an Olympus 12-50mm, f3.5 to f6.3. I bought it assuming the reviews would be right and I'd be left with a lens that was, um, at least weatherproof. But now that I've gotten to know it a little better I'll be happy to shoot with it. Seems sharp at both ends and in the middle. The rival camera companies (Panasonic vs. Olympus) seem to have worked out some sort of truce that allows them to correct each other's lenses for geometry, vignetting and chromatic aberrations. And what I'm left with is a lens that's more than adequate for my intended use at a very agreeable price. Plus I have a 20 stop image stabilization device I'm just aching to try with this lens. It's called a tripod....

The lens is goofy. It has a motorized zoom. But you can turn it off and zoom it with your finders. It has a button on the side that doesn't do anything on Panasonic cameras and it's long and skinny and plastic. If you can get over those things it is actually a nice lens for general photography in good light. My quest is (for now) over. Almost forgot: it also kinda does macro. 

That's my review of the Olympus 12-50mm lens. It's been Tuck Tested and found to be more than acceptable.

I am stuck between two conflicting photography paradigms but that doesn't mean I'm not loving it!

eeyore's birthday party. 2013.

Gosh. Every time I point out what I think is happening in our markets and our art I get notes of concern from sensitive readers who think I've become morose or depressed. I'm sorry if my attempts at discourse are so ragged as to leave so much wiggle room when it comes divining to my emotional health. I'm generally giggling hysterically as I'm typing because my fingertips are incredibly sensitive!!!

eeyore's birthday party. 2013.

I get that life is in constant flux and undergoing chaos theory-style change and there's nothing I could do about it anyway. In short retrospect I think I'm making the continual journey into the unknown without too much fuss. I'm comfortable with the idea that even change is going through a non-linear, non-reccuring  metamorphosis. Really.....comfortable.....I've even got my fur lined Crocs on under my desk...

In both the film days and the digital days I've come to grips with the idea that making good images is pretty easy but making images that are really good (images I like for more than a week) is insanely difficult and I'm happy when I get one out of about 1,000 that works.

eeyore's birthday party. 2013.

I guess other people are more reticent about writing down ideas that come to them without weeks or months of turning the idea over and over again in order to be certain of its validity, its veracity. But nothing is certain and my style is to write about the things I ponder as I'm thinking of them so that what I write is fresh and, to me, topical. After all, why would you want to mull over stale thoughts?

For example, a few days ago I saw a video about Richard Avedon. As a subset of the the things I took away from the video was the way the cameras he chose to use for various projects effected the work he was doing on those projects. And who can deny that there are extreme technical and stylistic differences between his medium format images, done in the studio in the 1950's and 1960's, and the work done for In the American West project, which was done with an 8x10 inch camera on various available light locations?  

I tried to write about those differences in tools and how that relates to our work today. The boundaries of working with readily available digital tools more or less re-enforce working with much smaller formats. It's a fact that the unawareness of available tools imposes a limitation on the scope of our collective vision. It would be nice to have available----for the people whose vision skews that way---inexpensive larger formats in digital so we could replicate the OPTICAL look of the larger formats (not the grain or color or etc., etc.).

I made these statements not in an attempt to trawl for some sort of remorseful empathy or sympathy but only as a statement of fact. It would be nice to work with a traditional Hasselblad with a full 6 by 6 cm digital sensor on the back. At an accessible price. I'm looking for the visual differences that the physics of size makes, not technology!

But not having these particular tools doesn't plunge me into a funk. I'm generally quite happy to play with the full range of what's available. My discourse on the subject was meant to be along the line of "New Coke" versus "Old Coke" with the underlying hope that the camera marketers would read my blog and mark another check in a box on some marketing study form that has a box which reads, "Study subject would like bigger sensors!"  I also wanted to remind readers that the boundaries of our craft are bigger than those that we see offered to us every day by the leading camera vendors.

It's important to remember, when reading, that not everyone has the same shooting style or requirements and many have styles that do a great job leveraging the smaller sensors and the tools (lenses) available for smaller framed cameras. The photos on Robin Wong's great blog always comes to mind.....

One commenter applauded me for acknowledging my own hypocrisy but I don't think it's as much hypocrisy as it is being stuck between two conflicting paradigms that represent the best of past and present. Every person vacillates between known and unknown, tried and untried. I'm sure that if the reader was privy to the continuity of my thoughts he would see my more carefully and continually crafted rationalizations for my pendular swings of allegiance and would recognize them as contiguous parts of a saner continuum. 

After all, most photographers I knew (commercial photographers) in the glorious days of film had three systems that they used interchangeably: 35mm, 120 and 4x5. Each had it's place in the rotation and in logic. No one begrudged them the choice then and no one required an unflagging dedication to one format or the other. 

My happiness or unhappiness is scarcely ever affected by my access to various camera formats. My temporary and evanescent sadness was only for the thought that we should have.......more. But "always more" seems to be the penultimate thought of American culture and I am, after all, an American Photographer.

eeyore's birthday party. 2013.

Yes, I want a large sensor medium format digital camera! Yes, I'm having a blast shooting with a Panasonic G6 this week. Go figure.

Who would have thought that the victors would be the companies with open standard lens mounts?

No doubt about it. Canon and Nikon have spent decades making really good photographic products. And Kodak spent 100 years making better and better films. But in the case of the camera manufacturers it looks like the long term spoils will go to the camera companies that succeeded in creating the defacto open standards as they apply to lens mounts.

I've written for nearly five years now about the critical benefits of the EVFs with their instant and credible feedback loop for photography and we are now seeing that the tipping point has been reached and the trend makers in our industry are consistently reaching for the cameras that give them instant and effective live view on a full time basis. This delivers lots of benefits for most photographers with very few detractions.

Traditional mirrored DSLRs can be used in live view modes but those modes are still archaic, first gen. manifestations of real time live view that cripple the shooting and handling performance of the cameras. And, in every instance the operator must use the rear LCD screen to compose, focus and shoot with instead of being able to make use of a high resolution EVF. The traditional DSLR is quickly becoming synonymous with the idea of a hampered photographic experience because it can only be used in live view mode in a very basic and very unsatisfying way. One only has to try to shoot moving action with a DSLR in live view mode with his back to the sun in order to see, vividly, the limitations.

So the thing that mirror less cameras really brought to the table and the reason I use them in my work is not the smaller size and bulk of the systems but the fact that they have the most advanced and informative viewing system of all the tools available by dint of having a fully functional, real time feedback system. I'm found, over the years, that once you embrace the joy of "pre-chimping" a scene with a great feedback loop construct you'll never willingly go back to the optical finder with its inherent lack of information and immediacy.

For me, the size difference of the competing systems is a remotely secondary parameter in choosing between the different cameras.

But that's the draw for me and for generations of photographers who grew up dependent and happy with eye level viewing methods. That doesn't really speak to the reasons that many more people are embracing the mirror-less, compact cameras that are advancing in the market (with the exception of north America). No, I think an enormous number of ardent amateurs, semi-pros and wild artists are drawn toward the mirror less options because the shorter film plane to lens flange distance allow for easy adaptation of millions and millions of existing DSLR lenses that can work remarkably well on these cameras. In many (most?) instances you'll lose some niceties like auto focus and advanced program modes but you'll gain an almost infinite range of optical options, many of which have been available at bargain prices. It's the first really open standard lens mounting opportunity of the digital age!

I imagine that buyers of the Sony A7 variants will buy them as much for their ability to (with adapters) accept the best lenses from every competing system. With the purchase of just two adapters you'll have the run of the entire Canon and Nikon lens catalogs. Think the Nikon 105 DC lens is the best portrait lens ever made for full frame 35mm cameras? You are only one adapter away from using it on an A7. But do you also need a nice, 17mm tilt and shift lens? Of course you can adapt Canon's one of a kind 17mm T/S lens with ease.  Have you held onto a bag full of Leica R or M lenses? With the right adapter you'll be able to re-integrate (what many believe to be) the world's greatest glass with the addition of an inexpensive adapter.

The same applies to the micro four thirds cameras. Just about every optic made for photography in the past 50 years can be pretty well adapted to the Olympus or Panasonic cameras. In many cases the adapter rings can be as cheap as $25.

Having two systems that represent open lens standards effectively eliminates the one barrier to system entry that makes people so loathe to change to better cameras as technology evolves. The closed standards of traditional DSLR lens mounts held people with big investments in "glass" into systems that may have been leapfrogged by competitors who created better camera bodies.

I remember in the middle of the first decade of professional digital photography that many of use were locked into Nikon because that was a system we'd shot for years and years. In one sense we wanted to be locked in because the lenses were, in many cases, demonstrably better than competitive lenses in the same ranges. But we were stuck with the D2H and then the D2X APS-C cameras as our only real choices for camera bodies. The D2X at 12 megapixels was Nikon's highest resolution camera and everyone who ever owned one would tell you that you really couldn't shoot the machine effectively above 400 ISO because the noise quickly became unmanageable.

At the same time Canon was launching full frame cameras with more and more resolution and the ability to shoot at much higher ISO's without the unwanted Jackson Pollack Effect. Many of us would have loved to have incorporated a Canon body into our systems and to have been able to use one effectively with the lenses we knew, loved and had depreciated.

And then Nikon flipped the tables and came out with their D3, D3s and D3X cameras and I can only imagine that the Canon shooters would have loved to slap some of their better glass onto the Nikon, full frame cameras----mostly to take advantage of a wildly successful generation of fast, high ISO shooting tools but also, in the case of the sports photographers, to take advantage of a much more reliable focusing sports camera. And in fact many did switch over time from both sides of the aisles.

The introduction of the Sony Nex 7 offered a delicious taste of freedom for Leica M users who could, for the first time, get great files from their investment in M lenses, albeit with a cropped frame. The Sony A7's will mean that the M users (and the few R users) will get to use their lens investments on a full frame camera with equally good imaging performance but at a quarter the price of the Leica M body.

If you are not operating in the lofty heights of Leica lenses the micro four thirds offers so many choices that it must be embarrassing for their more traditional rivals. And the idea that I can buy a Panasonic GH3 because I want the great video performance and then I can buy a OMD EM-1 for the image stabilization and possible improvement in jpeg images SOOC but still keep to one line of lenses is equally seductive. For my Panasonic system I can opt to cherry pick each companies line of lenses. Say the Panasonic 7 to 14mm for the shorter focal lengths, the Olympus 17mm 1.8 for a quick PJ lens, the wildly good Pana/Leica 25mm lens for everyday wear, the high performance Olympus 45mm 1.8 for discreet portrait work, the 35-100 f2.8 from Panansonic for stage work and so on.

If Olympus comes out with a better video body then....adios Panasonic but without the usual disruption and financial loss of having to re-rationalize the lens collection. It all seems so logical.
Wide open standards so you can optimize your systems for the way you shoot. That trumps the arguments about size and price and puts the focus on the stuff that focuses....

Nikonians love Nikons and Apple Computer users love their Macs. But the reality is that the market rewards companies that offer products which feature open standards. And that means millions of people are trying Android systems or buying Linux machines, using Java and opting for open standards even within Microsoft OS environments.  And for good reason....the consumer gets to choose the best "apps" for their use. And they get to hang on to their investments as they upgrade their platforms.

It's not about mirror less cameras, per se. It's more about open standards in the most expensive aspect of the hobby/vocation, the collection of good lenses. Just as it's not about camera size as much as it is about the convenience of use that comes from EVFs and more mature and useful visual feedback loops. Feedback loops that don't require iterative test shots.

It's only a matter of time before Canon and Nikon follow Sony, Olympus, Fuji and Panasonic into mirror less cameras. They will make short film flange to sensor plane cameras if for no other reason than to compete in the open systems market. It's all about the most efficient ecosystems, even if that's harder for consumers to articulate in surveys. And it's all changing right now.